I’ve been a Media Center user for many years. At present I have a somewhat aging PC connected into my hifi rack. This has a couple of external drives on it and has served me well. However I really do want more space, with resilience. So I’ve been setting out my options for a storage server of some sort. I have read a number of threads on the subject, so apologies for creating yet another one. 

Whats important to me is flexibility, both now and in terms of how it’ll grow as my requirements do. At present I need around 1Tb of space, but that is likely to grow significantly over the coming couple of years. I’m not looking for the absolute cheapest solution, though I’m not looking to throw piles of cash at it either. What’s struck me is that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious solution right now. As such I’d really like to share my thinking so far – I know that many of you have been in similar situations and I’d love to get the befit of your experiences. 

So, here are the options that I’ve come up. It is possible to mix and match these somewhat, but these seem to represent the broadly distinct routes I could take:

1.      1. Windows Media Center PC with RAID array

Probably the cheapest and neatest solution, this gives me 1 box that can store and serve all my content. The downside is that as its going to contain a decent number of drives it’ll be fairly large and noisy. That means I realistically need to store it away somewhere. That gives me the issue of plumbing it back to the my TV plus I don’t have anywhere convenient to put it at the moment. The biggest issue for me though is the need to build the array up front – I don’t have an immediate need for vast amounts of storage and I’d really like to grow capacity over time, as drive prices drop. I really don’t relish having to juggle my data and rebuild an array with a whole new batch of disks 18 months down the line.

2.       2. NAS / DAS + optional Media Center PC

There are a few decent looking storage solutions out there. I’ve taken a particular look at the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+. These both have the advantage of flexibility in that different sized disks can be used, and the array can be added to over time without the need to rebuild it, getting over the main shortfall of "standard" RAID. I could directly connect them to my existing somewhat old media PC, or just put them on the network (yes I know the Drobo isn’t a NAS without add ons). The main negative of these solutions is cost - they’re both pretty expensive. Also whilst the ReadyNAS is fairly sophisticated it clearly lacks the abilities of a PC, so if I want to run server apps (torrents etc) I will need the media PC as well. Overall a decent if expensive solution and being “off the shelf” very quick to get up and running with.

3.       3. Windows Home Server

Though I could install this on a home built PC there seem to be a growing number of servers available at a decent price – certainly a lot less than the NAS systems above. These have the advantage of being compact and quiet – certainly no worse than a NAS. As I see it the benefit of WHS is that its fairly solid at what it does today, and is hopefully going to be a developing platform. Right now its got some genuinely useful features, with useful third party addons appearing with increasing regularity. As a version 1 product I’d assume we’ll see MS develop it further – I see a Power Pack is to released soon. Like many others I hope and dream that MS will create a Windows Media Server build at some point, combining the benefits of WHS with Media Center and allowing us to centralise tuners and storage. So overall it seems to perform its core functions well, with more flexibility than a NAS and the hope of greater things to come. At the moment I would need to keep a media PC as well, but at least WHS bridges the gap somewhat between an essentially dumb NAS and a fully featured PC OS, allowing me to move some server type functionality onto it over time. On the downside I really don’t like the way it handled redundancy. I love the fact that adding disks seems to be quick and easy, but why do I have to double up on all my storage! Yes I know I can decide which shares to duplicate but to be honest if I’m putting it on a server I want it all to be resilient. 

None of these solutions is ideal, and all have benefits over the others. I’ve pretty much discounted the first simply on the basis of its inflexible storage. I really don’t want to go out and buy 5 disks, only to have to rebuild the array when I fill it. 

So I’m pretty much torn between the latter two. Both are fairly quick and easy to deploy and are pretty comparable in cost. The NAs approach gives me a known quantity now in terms of flexible disk management, though that same known quantity benefit means it lacks future feature expansion. The new kid on the block, WHS isn’t perfect just yet but shows promise - If I had a better idea of MS’s roadmap for it it might make my decision much easier. Overall I do still lean to WHS despite its lack of parity based redundancy. Disks are hugely expensive and I’m hoping that by the time my storage needs have grown to a point where it’ll be an issue that MS will have moved things on.

So, what have I missed? Do people wildly disagree with my points, and what did others who’ve gone through similar thought processes come out with? Let me know.

I use a second computer with a hardware RAID tucked away to hide the noise.  It's built with "FreeNAS" and connected to my Media Center using iSCSI so it mounts and performs just like a local disk.

Since you are using a hardware RAID, you can get any capability you'd like just buy buying a card that does what you want such as RAID-6 (i.e. no rebuilds) or JBOD (use any combo of disks you like).  I use RAID-0 for performance and capacity and use it strickly to store my "expendable" media, but FreeNAS is very capable of doing whatever as well including software RAID.

The downside is you provide the hardware, although sometimes you that's an upside too.

If you aren't familar with iSCSI is essentially more like a SAN (DAS over network protocols) and iSCSI is included with Vista and a free download on XP from Microsoft.  Been working great for me.

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Vista Media Center with (2) DirecTV D11 Tuners, (1) FusionHDTV OTA tuner, (2) Xbox360 Extenders

xziTony,

Quick question about FreeNAS...  Since you're using iSCSI, is the content on that volume only accessible via the Windows iSCSI node?  In other words, can an iSCSI volume be monted via iSCSI to one machine, and still accessible via normal Windows File Sharing on another directly through FreeNAS?  I assume two nodes cannot mount the same volume via iSCSI at once, correct?

Also, can FreeNAS expand a software RAID volume without rebuilding everything?

Thanks,

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Dan - O

Correct, with iSCSI you can only mount it to one machine--so it works very much like DAS storage.  You can, however, choose to mount a volume as NAS storage as well.

As for it's software RAID capaiblities I'm not too sure because I don't use then, I have a Promise TX2000 card for my RAID just as a way to recoup my old IDE drives when I upgraded my computer to SATA.

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Vista Media Center with (2) DirecTV D11 Tuners, (1) FusionHDTV OTA tuner, (2) Xbox360 Extenders

I have some experience with this as I was a ReadyNAS user who is now using WHS. I loved the ReadyNAS in that it was easy and farily quiet and I could place it anywhere on the network. But once I started streaming more HD I noticed that it was not very fast even though it has gigabit ethernet.

I have since moved to WHS and couldn't be happier. I built my own machine and bought the OS. Of course I am in control of the hardware I am using and I find it to be much faster than the ReadyNAS. And I built it out of mostly spare parts, like and older P4 3.0 GHz processor and 1GB RAM. Additionally adding or removing drives is very easy. I have already upgraded my WHS twice, swapping out smaller drives and replacing them with larger, without any data losss.

And of course you have centralized backups that actually work quite well. Folder replication and media streaming. And another cool thing is the ability to remote into all your computers via WHS without having to punch a ton of holes in your firewall.

Take a look at it. Even though it is new you can totally build it to your specs now and upgrade it easily tomorrow.

I've just got 2.5 TB of stuff sitting on a normal XP pro box in my networking room

all my htpc's and laptops access all the data sitting on it.  I'm at the point now where I may at some point consider moving to WHS to do a better job of mirroring/redundancy, but I'll let others bang their heads on it for 18+ months before I move there

all the stuff I really care about (home movies/pics) I backup on a little linksys NSLU2

it mostly sucks (the slug) but it works for what I want it to do

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HTPC#1: MSI K8NGM2-FID, Athlon X2 3800+, 1gb kingston ram, Nvidia Dual Tuner, MCE 2005

HTPC#2: ASUS M2NBP-VM CSM, Athlon X2 3800+, 1gb kingston ram, Hauppauge 150MCE, MCE 2005

Thanks for the feedback so far guys.

xtiTony - my understanding was that there's not an open RAID standard that supports the use of different sized drives. From what you're saying though some do allow you to add additional ddrives without a rebuild? I checked RAID 6 and from what I can tell all it adds if greater resilience, not drive handling flexibility. JBOD is no good to me as resilience is one of my key requirements. Sounds like it works well for you, but not sure it'll give me the flexibility I need as I add adhoc drives in the future.

Muxoman - sounds like you've been through the same hoops as I'm considering. In the past I've built all my own PCs and servers, but in this case I'm heavily leaning towards a prebuilt one - there seem to be a few dencent ones available and the cost isn't hideous. From what I've seen I'd expect WHS to perform faster than a NAS - good to hear that's your experience too. Nice to hear you've not hit on any huge pitfalls with it just yet.

Tikker - the Linksys looks good, but I really am after an all in one storage server with built in resilience.

Overall I'm still leaning towards WHS. Sounds like it performs well, and as its cheaper than the NAS options I could make up for the less efficient resilience by using extra disks. One associated question though - I'd ideally want to use eSATA for adding extra storage. Does anyone know of a cost effective multi drive external chassis with eSATA connectivity? I really don't want mutliple external drives cluttering the place up...

you could use the NSLU2 as an all in one, but I would definitely go with WHS before it

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HTPC#1: MSI K8NGM2-FID, Athlon X2 3800+, 1gb kingston ram, Nvidia Dual Tuner, MCE 2005

HTPC#2: ASUS M2NBP-VM CSM, Athlon X2 3800+, 1gb kingston ram, Hauppauge 150MCE, MCE 2005

I just finished building what could be the ideal solution for you.  Provides both WHS-based NAS and iSCSI-based SAN in the same box.  So you get the ease of use and nice Windows integration features of Windows Home Server and you can configure very high-performance iSCSI SAN drives for use in recording HD directly over the network from MCE (very hard to do with a share-based approach).

To create this, I took Windows Home Server ($149 on Newegg), loaded it on a box built from an 8-bay, hot-swap SAS/SATA chassis with a micro-ATX motherboard (Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory).  I added an LSI 8208ELP SATA RAID controller to it - not for RAID, really, just for connectivity to 8 drives.

iSCSI functionality comes from DataCore SAN Melody ($199, download)

I set up 3 drives for WHS to use, and kept two drives for the SAN side.  Datacore does 'thin provisioning', so you set up virtual volumes and assign them to initiators, and the volumes are presentede to the initiators as if they were 2TB of disk, even when the actual consumption is much smaller.  That's a very handy and unique feature.  Data is striped across the drives in the pool.  Datacore doesn't do RAID - I'll probably add more drives and turn on basic mirroring of the drives in this portion of the pool.

It's really two servers in one physical box - one for SAN, the other for NAS, each with unique advantages.  But the combination is very powerful.  You could do this with Linux, I suppose, but you wouldn't get the feature set, and it wouldn't be as easy to integrate and manage.

Question: If I put this together as an integrated solution and offered it on EBay, what would it be worth?  Figure 2TB of physical disk to start with on two spindles, and you supply drives from there.  Would $2000 US be a reasonable price for this kind of capacity and feature-set, especially if it was pre-integrated and worked out of the box?

P.S. - You won't find the chassis anywhere.  It's not shipping commercially yet.

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Setup:
HTPC: Intel DG965WH board, , C2D 2.4GHz processor, 2GB mem, Vista SP1
Server: GbE to 8TB of remote iSCSI and WHS-managed storage

How did I know you were going to mention selling it at the end of the post :P.

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How to ask questions the smart way

Just trying to do some market research, sir! :)  I think I've been pretty open about how it's done.  There are clearly alternatives to the approach I describe.  I'm trying to figure out if there's a market out there for this kind of thing that would make it worth my while to pursue it as a side business or full time.  TANSTAAFL.

I realize that this is a hobbyist forum.  The target market for this is mainly hobbyists, I think.  Mainstream consumers aren't good candidates.

The concept I have in mind is somewhere between finished consumer product and a bucket of piece parts.  Ordered as a unit over the Web.  The value-add is the pre-verification that everything works with everything else, the integration of the piece parts, including software, into a basic working system and provision of a support infrastructure, including experience-based documentation (written by a native English speaker!).  You could do this yourself (instructions below), but it's time-consuming and tedious.

The hobbyist-customer value would be in integrating it into the home theater environment - configuring the WHS and iSCSI connections, installing additional disk capacity, installing add-in components, etc. - by definition this is not an appliance and therefore not locked down.

I'd have to make enough from the exercise to pay the bills.  Goal would be to price it such that the integrated solution costs roughly what a hobbyist would pay to put it together from scratch, perhaps with a small premium to recognize the value of labor hours saved.

That said - interesting or not?  Here's the retail BOM cost for the configuration, based on what I paid to put this together, including software:

Chassis                                       ~$400

Baseboard                                    $95  (Includes GbE and video, on-board SATA not used)

Processor                                    $125

Memory                                       $80

LSI 8208ELP Controller             $214 (cheapest 8-port PCIe I could find with the right connectors)

2x1TB disk drives                       $378  (need two for mirrored redundancy, 1TB for capacity)

6x1TB expansion drives               Not included - add your own - that's the point.

Windows Home Server               $149 (NewEgg)

DataCore SAN Melody              $199 (vendor download)

Total:                                          $1640

So $2K would be a $360 adder over the retail BOM cost of what it would take to build entirely from scratch.  And I've just told everyone on this board how to do it themselves, so I'm not keeping the secret sauce very secret!

Is this a viable product at any price, or not?  If so, what's the right price?

An existing commercial example of this kind of thing is the Inteset TeraRAID XV-NAS (http://www.inteset.com/products/TeraRAIDXVNAS/).  I guarantee you that it's a LOT more than $2K, and it doesn't have iSCSI target capability.  Comes with its own custom installer, which I assume is not what the hobbyist community wants.

Thanks!

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Setup:
HTPC: Intel DG965WH board, , C2D 2.4GHz processor, 2GB mem, Vista SP1
Server: GbE to 8TB of remote iSCSI and WHS-managed storage

I'd love to see some pictures!

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How to ask questions the smart way

can someone tell me how exactly the Data protection works in WHS? Currently I use RAID5. I think the continuously expandable data pool is nice, but without any data redundancy I would be scare to put all that much data in such a storage setup like that.

Muxoman:

I have some experience with this as I was a ReadyNAS user who is now using WHS. I loved the ReadyNAS in that it was easy and farily quiet and I could place it anywhere on the network. But once I started streaming more HD I noticed that it was not very fast even though it has gigabit ethernet.

I have since moved to WHS and couldn't be happier. I built my own machine and bought the OS. Of course I am in control of the hardware I am using and I find it to be much faster than the ReadyNAS. And I built it out of mostly spare parts, like and older P4 3.0 GHz processor and 1GB RAM. Additionally adding or removing drives is very easy. I have already upgraded my WHS twice, swapping out smaller drives and replacing them with larger, without any data losss.

And of course you have centralized backups that actually work quite well. Folder replication and media streaming. And another cool thing is the ability to remote into all your computers via WHS without having to punch a ton of holes in your firewall.

Take a look at it. Even though it is new you can totally build it to your specs now and upgrade it easily tomorrow.

What was you issue with the ReadyNas?  Currently I have mind connected to my VMC via a cross-link cable on it's on network.  This was done to minimize the amount of traffic that was actually being routed through my router. 

Also whilst the ReadyNAS is fairly sophisticated it clearly lacks the abilities of a PC, so if I want to run server apps (torrents etc) I will need the media PC as well.

Netgear have produced their own bittorent package on the latest firmware version - so no need for the MCE PC to do that